China May Have Committed A Tiananmen Square-Scale Massacre This Year — And Totally Covered It Up

A local woman on a crutch
shouts at Chinese paramilitary police wearing riot gear as a
crowd of angry locals confront security forces on a street in the
city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region on July 7,
2009.David
Gray/Reuters

Many feared that the recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong
would end with a crackdown reminiscent of the 1989 Tiananmen
Square massacre, when the Chinese army crushed a peaceful student
occupation of central Beijing and killed hundreds or even
thousands of people in the process.

This speculation, and the global attention to Hong Kong, ignores
a crucial piece of context: The Chinese government already killed
scores of demonstrators in a single incident earlier this year.
And it did so under circumstances that are the exact opposite of
the situation in Hong Kong — far from the prying eyes of the
international media, in a distant and peripheral part of the
country that's home to a restive minority group with a whole
different set of grievances against Beijing.

In early August, the president of the Germany-based World Uyghur
Congress claimed that at least 2,000 members of China's Uyghur
minority
had been killed the previous month in and around Elishku, a
town in China's far west. China's 12 million Uyghurs are Muslims
who speak a language related to Turkish and who enjoy few civil,
national, political, or religious rights under China's
nationalistic and authoritarian system.

Business Insider

Beijing eventually admitted to killing 96 people in the
incident, but did not
allow any international or independent media or human rights
monitors into the area. The incident took place in a very remote
area; the violence likely involved police opening fire on
demonstrators, rather than tanks or heavy vehicles.

There were
riots in the Uyghur city of Urumqi in 2009, and Uyghur
separatists are responsible for various acts of terrorism
throughout China, like a
March 2014 knife attack at a train station in Kunming that
left over 30 people dead. The incidents that have been met
with increased levels of oppression. The alleged massacre in
Elishku came as the result of a local, semi-spontaneous march on
a police station in the township,
according to Radio Free Asia.

A few photographs of the unrest ended up on Weibo, China's
version of Twitter, some of them depicting
bloodstained streets and burned-out vehicles. They were
quickly deleted. No one outside of China has publicly verified
what happened in Elishku, but experts won't dismiss the
possibility of a significant death toll with witnesses
telling Radio Free Asia that it's possible over 1,000 people
were killed.

"In my opinion, the truth
lies somewhere in between what state media says and what diaspora
groups like the World Uyghur Congress say,"Thomas Nelson, an observer of Uyghur affairs and editor
of theUyghur
Updatenewsletter, told
Business Insider by email. "But with a discrepancy as large as
this one, where you have one side say less than 100 deaths and
the other saying more than 2,000, there's still the potential for
a frighteningly large number of casualties."

In September, Nelson
wrote that a series of security incidents in China's west had
caused an uptick in the possibility of a future state-led mass
killing incident targeted at Uyghurs, based on the conclusions of
the Early Warning
Project's expert opinion pool.

Henryk Szadziewski, senior researcher for the Uyghur Human Rights Project, told
Business Insider it was difficult to confirm the Elishku
incident's death toll, thanks to Beijing's obstruction of any
independent monitors. But he added that Beijing is currently
pivoting its priorities in Uyghur territory towards more
security-oriented policies.

"What we've seen in the past year is a shift among the central
leadership for policies in the region away from the emphasis on
development," Szadziewski told Business Insider. He said
that Chinese president Xi Jinping made "a key statement" in
January emphasizing that security would be Beijing's top priority
in the west, after years of attempting to pacify the region
through large-scale government building projects.

A very different type of
protest in Hong Kong was met with a different type of
response.REUTERS/Bobby
Yip

Since July, China has imprisoned major Uyghur civil society
figures, most notably a prominent rights advocate and scholar who
was
sentenced to life in prison in late September. "It's
a very clear signal that the government won't tolerate
opposition to its ethnic
policies," Szadziewski said.

Which is a reminder of just how unique an event the Hong Kong
protests have been.

In a cosmopolitan center of international finance, Beijing has
had to carefully tread around its handling of mass dissent. It
wants to impose its will on a restive population without having
to resort to measures that could tarnish China's image or risk a
further escalation.

Out in the hinterlands, the Beijing government can essentially do
whatever it wants. Despite the global media attention on Hong
Kong, the government has a free hand in how it deals with dissent
in much of the world's most populous country — even if it
involves killing on a massive scale.